Spelling
Some folks who read this book are going to be surprised by the way I spell a few words. For example, most books write “tai chi chuan” instead of “taijiquan”, “Taoism” instead of “Daoism”, “Lao Tsu” instead of “Laozi”, “Chuang Tsu” instead of “Zhuangzi”, and so on. What I am doing is using a modern, official method of transliterating Chinese words called “pinyin” instead of an older system that was invented by Western missionaries and academics. The reason why I use it is because it's the way the Chinese government wants us to spell it. Since China has been horribly “screwed over” by Western imperialists for a very, very long time. I think it's only polite to spell their language the way they want.
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Generally Western books about Daoism follow a 19th century transliteration system call “Wade-Giles”. (This is the “tai chi chuan”, “Taoism”, etc.) But it was replaced by the new pinyin system in the late 20th century. This is not just an arcane issue for translators, though. Written Chinese is very different from Western languages in that it is not based on sounds but ideas. This means that anyone trying to learn how to read and write in Chinese doesn't have the option of “spelling out” the letters of a word and then using the sounds to figure out its meaning. For hundreds of years educated Chinese people have understood how the use of letters instead of picture-graphs makes it much, much easier to learn. But traditional Chinese has one huge advantage over Western letters: it allows people who speak different dialects to use the same written language. Ancient Latin mutated into several different languages: Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese, and so on. Chinese did the same thing: Mandarin, Hakka, Yue (Cantonese), Jin, and so on. Now people who speak and write French cannot understand oral or written Portugese because both are based on the sound of the spoken language. But in China, people who only speak Hakka and others who only understand Mandarin can read what each other writes---because the language is based on ideas and pictures instead of sound.
Since traditionally only a small percentage of Chinese citizens were literate, the extreme difficulty of learning the written language wasn't considered a big problem. And the huge size of China almost guaranteed that any attempt to create a standardized spoken language would be doomed to fail. The ability of the written language to transcend the emergence of dialects was a tremendous asset when it came to keeping the nation from falling to pieces (like the Roman Empire did in Europe.) To a large extent, the “idiosyncrasies” of written Chinese allowed the nation to survive.
But now is now and China needs universal literacy if it is going to function in the modern world. So the government embarked on the very ambitious project of making Mandarin the standard language. And once people learned that, it allowed them to make learning written Chinese much easier. That is, it is easier to teach adult learners the European letters, then the pinyin spelling for each of the common characters that ordinary people use, and, then learn the characters associated with that pinyin. Pinyin also is important in being able to use various modern technologies such as computer keyboards. (Try to imagine using a keyboard that worked using traditional characters----!) This means that European letters are now integral to using Chinese in various settings. As a result, all children in mainland China are now taught pinyin as part of their elementary school education.
What this means is that pinyin is not just a transliteration system for Westerners, it is now a basic part of the Chinese language. And as such, using the old Wade-Giles transliterations is not only insulting, but quite wrong. This is also why I try to use pinyin instead.
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